


Afterthought

by Mauser_Frau



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Complex Relationship, Dead Parents, Early Children of the Vault, Gen, Gore, Tyreen being Tyreen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:54:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27050761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauser_Frau/pseuds/Mauser_Frau
Summary: They get into it once the kohl comes out.  “I need to talk to you,” Troy insists.  “I need you to listen.”Contains no incestuous matter, though if you’ve read any of my other Borderlands stories, some content could be taken down that road.
Kudos: 2
Collections: Grimeverse





	Afterthought

Before— Typhon never laid a hand on him.

That might have made things easier. He’d at least have been there, been with him, felt that his father knew him enough to backhand him when he screwed up.

But, no. As soon as Mama was in the ground...

“Daddy, I don’t feel good.”

“Daddy can you read to me?”

“Daddy, have you seen Lil Ty. I’m scared. I...”

“Daddy, I...”

“Daddy?”

There was seldom any answer after that, and then: a thrown glass, a sharp word, a glance in the reflection of a blank monitor.

If Tyreen hadn’t cuddled up against his back at night, he would have sworn some days that he had disappeared. 

*

He wakes up in full sun, his head in his sister’s lap. 

Troy gropes the seat beneath them. Right, they’re in the back of a Technical. The air conditioner cranks while he bundles himself tighter in an emergency blanket. 

Tyreen pulls her headphones and smiles down at him. “Finally decide to join me, huh?”

“What time is it?” Troy yawns. His back grinds uncomfortably.

“No idea. We’re late though.”

Late is relative on Pandora. Shit happens.

Troy remembers he’s already scripted this tour out. Tyreen’s gotten almost too good at the verbal stabs for some of her lines.

He remembers too: “Hey, do you ever miss...”

Tyreen groans. She shoves her headphones back into place.

*

The outpost town is dusty, dim and sunburned. The sign advertising its underground caves hangs by half a rope and half a chain. People peer out of fractured windows as he and his sister make their way down the street.

The headman tells them, “We’ve had some, umm, trouble again. We did our best to clear them out...”

“Who’s them?” Troy yawns.

Tyreen snaps her fingers in his face. “Nylex Sen. False prophet. Preaches abstinence. One of her gangs.”

“Right, right.” He stops himself from rubbing his eyes. The whirr of the camera drone stirs his hair. And around him, the townspeople, they seem so close to their busted glass. 

*

Bandits and supplicants filter in soon after their arrival. The hillsides glint with metal and backfires. People wearing knives and skulls and Children of the Vault tattoos come to pay tribute.

Troy blesses anybody who asks. Tyreen strings a handful of other headmen along and dances with psychos. Mouthpiece parks a truck in the town square, and she climbs up on the bed.

Troy smiles. It’s been a while since she’s done a gonzo sermon with wet armpits.

“So, what revelation should I go over for ya? Hmm?” she asks the crowd. To a thousand different answers, she talks about herself.

If he hadn’t heard it all before, her energy would enchant him.

*

He’s going to have to tell her to stop soon. They need at least an hour for wardrobe and makeup. She’s brushing close to busting her voice.

Troy pushes his footmen out of the way and he heads towards her, hoping to catch her eye.

He hears it halfway through the crush of bodies.

“Hey, Daddy?”

He starts. 

No it’s...

It’s just a little girl.

Nobody he knows. 

“Mama’s not here,” a man says gently, out of all the whispers. “The bad people’s tyrant got her. These are good people.”

Troy stares at his boots. He shakes Daddy from his mind. 

He tries to, anyway.

*

They get into it once the kohl comes out. “I need to talk to you,” Troy insists. “I need you to listen.”

“I am listening,” Tyreen groans. She takes a hit of lip plumper. “Captive audience, by the way.”

“No, you’re not. Can you maybe be merciful for like five seconds?”

“I keep telling you, not that kind of god,” she sing-songs.

“Well, maybe I am.”

She pauses, turns, and flexes her swollen, pink mouth at him. “I know what you’re thinking.”

With a pencil close to his left eye, Troy accepts whatever she says next and the glitter for his markings, even though he finds the latter ridiculous.

“And OK, whatever. We make orphans too, you know.”

*

He tries, one more time, in that liminal, disarmed moment before they go on stage together. He tries to press on the heart of the matter.

“Let him go. We got away, Bro. Look at us! Look at them!” Tyreen opens her arms to the monitors, the way she used to when they did sky sermons all the time.

Bandits line the cavern as far as all the camera drones can see. Some stand up to their knees in too-clear toxic water. 

Today, she’s dressed some fanciful sort of general, crystals on her coat. 

Troy’s costume looks effete compared to hers. It feels though strangely comfortable. He fumbles his collars nonetheless. “I know you’re right, I just...”

She pulls him down to kiss him on the cheek. Without another word, she strides past the stage curtains.

Troy follows.

*

They declare the raid as an afterthought, tacked onto the end of divine nonsense and some Coleridge because Tyreen loves Coleridge.

They’ve no sooner descended the stage than the air bristles with weapons and people testing their guns.

Tyreen spins through the flickers of cordite.

Troy takes over the actual operation because the headman can’t make sense of his orders. So the guy’s supper for his sister then. For now— they’re under-manned and over-gunned and it’s far later in the day than Troy would have gotten started under any other circumstances. His is flack jacket doesn’t fit.

Snipers make short work of guards. Their people come gushing down the canyon at sunset, leaving smoke and spatter in their wake. The caged tyrant turns out to be so frail and thin there’s hardly any point in shooting the thing.

But somebody does it.

Troy, barely bloody, wanders in the middle of it all until someone calls him over.

*

Five of them. Five little boys. The one’s still in diapers. They shiver like dead leaves when anyone looks at them. Their skin is littered with hand prints. 

The toothless old woman who had them under her bed grins up at Troy.

“What is this?” he says. 

“Why, ah, God King, was it? Headman. Good sieur.” How she cackles. “Why, that’s yours. Don’t you know spoils when you see them?”

Troy feels the echoing snap in his muscles after he’s taken her. By the grace of his anger he holds her over his head. She struggles. He squeezes. Red slop sluices onto the floor.

In the corner of his eyes, the two oldest boys cradle each other close.

His heart thunders.

*

After— the air’s full of smoke and moonbeams. Troy makes his way to the back of a church. Which one? The one’s they’re at tonight. He lost track of the name someplace in the night.

His head hurts for a change.

“Hey, Ty?” he says, hand on the knob of the apartment door. 

Tyreen sprawls over the tiny bed, a $200 bottle of gin clasped to her chest and headphones blinking in her ears. At the writing desk, Mouthpiece taps at a laser projection of a piano keyboard. He looks up, nods, and draws on with his notes.

Troy nods too. He leaves the door unlatched and walks back down the shadows still lining the hall.


End file.
